Kwasi Kyei was supposed to be the lawyer in the family. His brother was supposed to be the doctor. Today Kwasi is in healthcare and his brother is in finance. Life, as he put it, has a sense of humor.
Today, he's co-founder and president of Handspring, a pediatric mental health company with 175 employees (and growing) working to get kids the evidence-based care they actually need before the window closes. The data is telling: About 50% of mental health disorders show symptoms by age 14. If you're trying to address the mental health crisis, you have to start young.
When Jill and I sat down with Kwasi, we had one of those conversations that makes you rethink something you thought was a separate problem entirely. Here are three things we learned.
Kwasi started Handspring after a conversation with a psychiatrist that left him unsettled in a way he couldn't shake. What he heard was that too many practitioners had moved to a model of prescribing medications to kids — often strong ones — as the default first step, with nurse practitioners and physician assistants running the volume while psychiatrists stayed in the background.
The evidence points the other way. Therapy first, medication as needed is the approach that works. But we've drifted so far from that as a country that we're now prescribing medications to 12-year-olds that other countries won't allow for anyone under 18.
Kwasi drew a direct comparison to social media. We handed something powerful to very smart, very well-resourced people and didn't think hard enough about the consequences. He believes we're setting up the same reckoning with pediatric medication — and that twenty years from now we'll look back at this era the way we now look back at the early days of Instagram.
That's what made him quit his job and start building.
This is the part of the conversation we think every leader needs to sit with. This isn’t a niche issue: One in three-to-four employees with kids has a child going through something significant right now. Not ‘anxious about a track meet’ or ‘struggling with algebra’ significant. Self-harm and suicidal ideation significant — numbers that are, by any measure, alarming.
And when a child is in that level of distress, the care required isn't passive. It's 8 to 12 hours a week. It involves driving, coordination, parent training, and emotional bandwidth that doesn't just get set aside when someone logs on for a 9am standup.
Kwasi's ask of executives is a practical one: stop treating pediatric mental health as a private family matter that lives outside the scope of your benefits strategy. The burden your employees are carrying is real, it's significant, and addressing it sooner means your people can show up more fully.
When we asked Kwasi about how companies should evolve their culture for a generation that treats mental health as non-negotiable, he didn't lead with wellness apps or therapy stipends (although these have merit).
At Handspring, they landed on two numbers that every employee sees: the percentage of parents who say Handspring's care changed their child's life, and how many kids they touched that month and year. That's it. One tells you the company is doing what they do well. The other tells you why it matters.
His reasoning is something any company in any industry can borrow. People don't disengage because the work is hard. They disengage when they can't see the line between what they do every day and what the company is actually for. The further you get from early stage startup, the easier it is to hide that line. The leaders who keep drawing it — simply, repeatedly, in ways everyone can understand — are the ones who hold people.
Listen to the full episode of Work Made Human to hear more from Kwasi Kyei — including what employee wellbeing actually means, how four-year sales cycles with insurance companies are actually a sign you're doing something right, and why he's genuinely excited about what Gen Z is going to do to the corporate world.